JOHN DOWER

Embracing Defeat

Japan in the Wake of World War II

The number of deaths usually cited for the armed forces — 1.74 million up to the time of surrender — is probably fairly accurate. On the other hand, estimates vary considerably where civilian deaths in air raids are concerned. When war-related military and civilian deaths outside Japan after August 15, 1945 are taken into consideration, the picture becomes even murkier. Japan's postsurrender governments tended to be evasive on such painful matters. All told, probably at least 2.7 million servicemen and civilians died as a result of the war, roughly 3 to 4 percent of the country's 1941 population of around 74 million. Millions more were injured, sick, or seriously malnourished. Approximately 4.5 million servicemen demobilized in 1945 were identified as being wounded or ill, and eventually some three hundred thousand were given disability pensions.15

In the most sweeping of material calculations, it was estimated that the Allied assault on shipping and the bombing campaign against the home islands destroyed one-quarter of the country's wealth. This included four-fifths of all ships, one-third of all industrial machine tools, and almost a quarter of all rolling stock and motor vehicles. General MacArthur's "SCAP" bureaucracy (SCAP, an acronym for Supreme Command[er] for the Allied Powers, was commonly used to refer to MacArthur's command) placed the overall costs of the war even higher, calculating early in 1946 that Japan had "lost one-third of its total wealth and from one-third to one-half of its total potential income." Rural living standards were estimated to have fallen to 65 percent of prewar levels and nonrural living standards to about 35 percent.16

Sixty-six major cities, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, had been heavily bombed, destroying 40 percent of these urban areas overall and rendering around 30 percent of their populations homeless. In Tokyo, the largest metropolis, 65 percent of all residences were destroyed. In Osaka and Nagoya, the country's second and third largest cities, the figures were 57 and 89 percent. The first American contingents to arrive in Japan — especially those that made the several-hour journey from Yokohama to Tokyo — were invariably impressed, if not shocked, by the mile after mile of urban devastation they encountered. Russell Brines, the first foreign journalist to enter Tokyo, recorded that "everything had been flattened . . . Only thumbs stood up from the flatlands — the chimneys of bathhouses, heavy house safes and an occasional stout building with heavy iron shutters."17 The first photographs and newsreel footage from the conquered land captured these endless vistas of urban rubble for American audiences thousands of miles away who had never really grasped what it meant to incinerate great cities.

Even amid such extensive vistas of destruction, however, the conquerors found strange evidence of the selectiveness of their bombing policies. Vast areas of poor people's residences, small shops, and factories in the capital were gutted, for instance, but a good number of the homes of the wealthy in fashionable neighborhoods survived to house the occupation's officer corps. Tokyo's financial district, largely undamaged, would soon become "little America," home to MacArthur's General Headquarters (GHQ). Undamaged also was the building that housed much of the imperial military bureaucracy at war's end. With a nice sense of irony, the victors subsequently appropriated this for their war crimes trials of top leaders. Railways still functioned more or less effectively throughout the country (Tokyo residents, for example, had been able to ride directly to distant Hiroshima to see if their kin had survived the atomic blast). Outside of devastated poor people's neighborhoods, most utilities including electricity and water were also still in working order. Wittingly or not, U.S. bombing policy, at least in the capital city, had tended to reaffirm existing hierarchies of fortune.18

Close to 9 million people were homeless when the emperor told them they had fought and sacrificed in vain. "In every major city," as one American described the scene, "families were crowded into dugouts and flimsy shacks or, in some cases, were trying to sleep in hallways, on subway platforms, or on sidewalks. Employees slept in their offices; teachers, in their schoolrooms" — if, of course, they were fortunate enough to still have offices or schoolrooms to sleep in. The streets of every major city quickly became peopled with demoralized ex-soldiers, war widows, orphans, the homeless and unemployed — most of them preoccupied with simply staving off hunger.19 Yet even these individuals were relatively fortunate. At least they were in their own country.